Lincoln in the Bardo, the 2017 Booker-prize winning novel by George Saunders, revolves around the events of a single night following the death of former US president Abraham Lincoln's son Willie Lincoln: the young boy is stuck in a semi-material plane, along with other damned souls, as he watched his father grieve in the cemetery. In the recently announced Golden Booker awards, which feature the best of the Booker prize winners from every decade since the 60s, Lincoln in the Bardo was chosen as 2010's best book. If the 'book of the decade' dealt with a soul sans a physical anchor, it is a mental manifestation of the state of limbo, an uprootedness, that drove the cold, abrasive literary genius of the 60s winner, V.S. Naipaul. In a way, the study of the books from different decades highlight the overarching political milieu as much as it chronicles the evolution of literature over the ages.
V.S. Naipaul, born to a 'high' caste Hindu family in Trinidad and Tobago, is nothing if not a controversial figure in his country of origin. Exhibit A: The uproar over his books An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilisation, sparked by a disdainful description of the rot, poverty, corruption and caste in post-Independence India. Brought up in the Carribean, where a large number of indentured Indian labourers have settled, Naipaul's writings betray a sense of bitterness—of wide-eyed dreams of a glorious heritage falling woefully short—disillusionment at a culture, that he believed to be his own, struggling to overcome the dual whammies of sustained colonisation and partition. “The beggars, the gutters, the starved bodies, the weeping swollen-bellied child black with flies in the filth and cow dung and human excrement of a bazaar lane, the dogs, ribby, mangy, cowed and cowardly, reserving the anger, like the human beings around them, for others of their kind," he wrote. His was a pain born of a conflict in identity, by all means a Biswas in search of a house. In his adopted homeland, he never belonged. His fellow Carribean Nobel laureate poet Derek Walcott wrote, in a scating poem 'The Mongoose', a polemic against his long-standing rival Naipaul: “The mongoose takes its orders from the Raj; The mongoose was brought to the Caribbean from India by the British”. It is Naipaul's penchant for an explicable cruelty, mixed in with his razor sharp observations, that best characterises his 1971 Booker-winning In a Free State. Critics have rightly pointed out its eerie similarities to the ruthlessness of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and its groundbreaking impact in the postcolonial literature. In a way, his writings summed up the immigrant experience perfectly, in the midst of—yet, curiously untouched by—global upheavals, receding imperialist powers, globalism, and momentous reforms like then US president Lyndon B. Johnson's 1965 Immigration Act which saw Indians migrating en masse to the US. It was the swinging sixties for only a few.
In stark contrast, the works of Michael Ondaatje, whose 1992 work The English Patient, was chosen for the Golden Booker, reflect the insecurities and pain of the post-war era. It narrates the tale of a nurse, a patient who has suffered severe burns in WWII and the former love of his life. The book is in the same traditions of the writers of the Beat Generation, eerily reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's Howl; in form and structure, there could not be a greater divergence, with the fast pace of the work slowly giving way to the hypnotic rhythm of the epilogue.
In Lincoln in the Bardo, the contemporary reality is fused with the changing aesthetics of literature unlike any other work in the list. The story, as it unfolds, takes on a dual character—oscillating between the strict confines of journalistic narration, mostly news items from events that occurred on the day—to a dreamlike, polyphonic chatter of deformed spirits ruminating on their lives in the limbo. It is a book, way ahead of its time, which—by theory of juxtaposition—opens up different avenues for chroniclers and fiction writers alike to work their craft.